Category: Tar Heelia

1. True or false: North Carolina has no remaining covered bridges.

2. How many times did Gomer Pyle say “Golllly!” on “The Andy Griffith Show”?

3. In 1950, North Carolina led the nation in number of minor league baseball teams. How many teams did it field — 15, 25 or 45?

4. Which of these is NOT a community in North Carolina: Lizard Lick, Loafers Glory, Norlina, Pumpkin Center, Social Circle.

5. What civil rights activist spent 22 days on an Orange County chain gang in 1947 for testing a state law requiring segregated seating on buses?

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1. False. It has two: The Pisgah bridge in Randolph County (rebuilt after being washed away in 2003) and the Bunker Hill bridge in Catawba County.

2. Only once (May 19, 1964). “Golllly!” became a catchword, however, on Jim Nabors’ spinoff show, “Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C.”

3. Forty-five. Today the number is fewer than a dozen.

4. Social Circle is in Georgia.

5. Bayard Rustin, then a little-known 35-year-old Quaker from New York. Rustin’s “Journey of Reconciliation” was essentially the first Freedom Ride. Later, as a key aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he would help organize the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at which King gave his “I have a dream” speech.

 

1. The Big Three of headache powders all originated in North Carolina. Name the products and their hometowns.

2. Sugar Ray Leonard, Charles Kuralt and Whistler’s mother were all born in what city?

3. The last fatal shark attack in N.C. waters occurred in 2001, 1991 or 1981?

4. What U.S. president supposedly reported seeing the legendary Maco Light?

5. To what was Gov. Thomas Bickett referring when he claimed in a 1918 speech, “They will yield more solid comfort for the inner man than possum and potatoes, and more juicy sweetness than the apples for which our first ancestor threw Paradise away”?

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1. Goody’s in Winston-Salem, B.C. in Durham, Stanback in Salisbury.

2. Wilmington.

3. 2001. A Virginia vacationer died from an attack at Avon on Hatteras Island, and his girlfriend was severely injured. It was the first death from shark bite on the N.C. coast since 1957.

4. Grover Cleveland, when his train stopped one night in 1889 to take on wood and water at Maco, near Wilmington. Twenty-two years earlier, flagman Joe Baldwin had been decapitated while trying to wave off an oncoming locomotive. Baldwin’s ghost supposedly continues to search for his head, carrying a lantern that accounts for a bobbing glow in the distance.

5. Liberty Bonds, which helped finance World War I.

 

1. In 1895 students at Davidson College voted to change the school colors to crimson and black — what had they been previously?

2. What lake once ranked among the world’s largest farms?

3. What are terpenes — and what do they have to do with the Blue Ridge Mountains?

4. Match these TV personalities from the ’50s and ’60s with where they retired.

A. Perry Como

B. Frances Bavier

C. Buffalo Bob Smith

D. Kate Smith

1. Raleigh

2. Saluda

3. Siler City

4. Flat Rock

5. Concerning his time at what college did novelist William Styron recall, “My innate sinfulness was in constant conflict with the prevailing official piety”?

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1. Pink and blue (team nickname: Preachers)

2. Lake Mattamuskeet in Hyde County. The shallow lake, 18 miles long and 6 miles wide, was drained — three times — by ambitious promoters in the early decades of the 1900s. Its bottom land produced mammoth harvests of corn, rice, soybeans and sweet potatoes, but operating problems finally won out. In 1934 the federal government bought the tract and created the Mattamuskeet Migratory Bird Refuge.

3. They’re chemicals given off by coniferous trees, and they’re responsible for the Blue Ridge’s characteristic haze.

4. A, 2; B, 3; C, 4; D, 1.6.

5. Davidson College. Styron left after a “miserable” freshman year and eventually graduated from Duke.

 

1. From scribbled notes on an early manuscript, Wilmington document examiner Maureen Casey Owens confirmed the identity of the author of what political roman a clef?

2. What was North Carolina’s first incorporated town?

3. For what was L.A. “Speed” Riggs famous?

4. In 1990 a whimsical “playing field” of seven spherically pruned holly bushes was installed on a sloping median in front of the Charlotte Coliseum. For what previous public art work was its architect, Maya Lin, best known?

5. In State vs. Mann in 1830, the N.C. Supreme Court declined to address the institution of slavery. The case later served as background for what 1852 novel that energized and broadened the abolitionist movement?

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1. “Primary Colors,” based on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Despite his earlier denials, “Anonymous” turned out to be Newsweek columnist Joe Klein.

2. Bath, laid out by John Lawson on the Pamlico River and incorporated in 1705.

3. For 33 years, the former Goldsboro tobacco auctioneer pitched Lucky Strikes on radio for American Tobacco with a sing-song chant that ended “Sold, American!”

4. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

5. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

 

Several new titles were just added to “New in the North Carolina Collection.” To see the full list simply click on the link in the entry or click on the “New in the North Carolina Collection” tab at the top of the page. As always, full citations for all the new titles can be found in the University Library Catalog and they are all available for use in the Wilson Special Collections Library.

1. What decorative object at the Hickory home of U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger caused a racial dispute in 1994?

2. What Duke University student did Reynolds Price recognize for writing fiction “as if a kind of perfect pitch had been inserted into her head by God”?

3. In 1987, Kivett’s Inc. of Clinton, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of sanctuary seating, designed and donated an ornate, 600-pound, bulletproof oak chair for a famous visitor to the United States.

Who was he?

4. “It came to me that I had been generally retracing the migration of my white-blooded clan from North Carolina to Missouri, the clan of Lancashireman who settled in the Piedmont in the eighteenth century. As a boy, again and again, I had looked at a blurred, sepia photograph of a leaning tombstone deep in the Carolina hills. I had vowed to find the old immigrant miller’s grave one day.” From what popular 1982 book does this passage come?

5. What influential 1997 book accused state government of mishandling research on pfiesteria, a tiny, toxic organism preying on fish in the rivers of Eastern North Carolina?

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1. A lawn jockey. The local NAACP chapter criticized it as “a reminder of the cotton-field days, the days when we were called ‘boy.’ ” Ballenger said the cast-iron statue was a family heirloom — nicknamed “Rochester,” after the black valet on the old “Jack Benny Show” — and refused to remove it. Eight years later he had it painted white.

2. Anne Tyler, who went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Tyler was born in Minneapolis, but graduated from Broughton High School in Raleigh and then Duke.

3. Pope John Paul II, who sat in the chair during his stop in Detroit.

4. “Blue Highways: A Journey into America.” William Least Heat Moon did find the site of his ancestor’s grave, near Asheboro, but it had recently been covered by a reservoir.

5. “And the Waters Turned to Blood” by Rodney Barker.

 

1. Before they settled into new facilities in Charlotte and Raleigh, the Carolina Panthers and the Carolina Hurricanes played in what cities?

2. Seven states can be seen from Rock City Gardens, the widely advertised attraction atop Lookout Mountain in Tennessee. Is North Carolina one of them?

3. What N.C. product is cited in Jimmy Buffett’s 1999 song, “I Will Play for Gumbo”?

4. The villain in which of these movies is described as “former art consultant to Jesse Helms”: “Wag the Dog,” “Air Force One” or “Naked Gun 21/2”?

5. True or false: North Carolina’s state tree is the dogwood.

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1. Clemson and Greensboro, respectively.

2. Yes — along with Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

3. Krispy Kreme doughnuts: “I’m not talking quesadillas or a dozen Krispy Kremes/Or a pound of caviar, that’s a rich man’s dream/No banana split or fillet of pompano/No, I will play for gumbo.” (Buffett has owned a number of Krispy Kreme franchises.)

4. “Naked Gun 21/2.”

5. False. The state tree is the pine (the dogwood is the state flower).

 

1. The symbol of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg displays back-to-back A’s — why?

2. In an alphabetical listing of the states, North Carolina precedes North Dakota. What state does it follow?

3. What famous golfer won his first professional tournament at Pinehurst in 1940? Which one won his last at Pinehurst in 1999?

4. True or false: More than 20 times as many North Carolinians died in the Civil War as in the Vietnam War.

5. A former U.S. senator from North Carolina and a writer known as the “poet laureate of Appalachia” share what name?

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1. It tagged itself the “All American” unit — the first to draw members from all 48 states. Formed in 1917 at Camp Gordon, Ga., the 82nd has been based at Fort Bragg since 1946.

2. New York.

3. Ben Hogan won the North and South Open, Payne Stewart the U.S. Open. Barely four months later Stewart died in a private plane crash near Aberdeen, S.D.

4. True. The Civil War claimed at least 33,000 soldiers from North Carolina; the Vietnam War, 1,609.

5. Robert Morgan. One served as state attorney general and as U.S. senator, the other is author of the best-selling “Gap Creek.”

 

1. What Piedmont North Carolinians call livermush, Pennsylvanians know as what?

2. Which city is wetter, Seattle or Charlotte?

3. In 1991 Florida State basketball player Sam Cassell, finding fans in the Smith Center considerably less rowdy than those at Duke, stuck them with what memorable label?

4. True or false: North Carolina is the nation’s leading producer of yams.

5. What historian remarked in 1920 that he had found in the black Durham neighborhood of Hayti “social and economic development perhaps more striking than that of any similar group in the nation”?

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1. Scrapple. The basic ingredients — hog’s head, liver and cornmeal — are the same.

2. Charlotte (with about 41.6 inches of annual precipitation to Seattle’s 37.7).

3. “A cheese-and-wine crowd.”

4. False. It is, however, No. 1 in sweet potatoes. Yams are grown mostly in South America, the Caribbean and western Africa and have white, barklike flesh.

5. W.E.B. DuBois.

 

1. Of North Carolina’s 100 counties how many are named for women?

2. What well-known food processor is located at the corner of Cucumber and Vine streets?

3. True or false: Though now often associated with North Carolina, the term “Tobacco Road” was first used in reference to Georgia.

4. On the Monopoly game board, what color is North Carolina?

5. Nearly one-third of North Carolina’s Lumbee Indians have one of what two surnames?

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1. Three: Dare County, named for Virginia Dare, first child of English parents born in the New World; Wake County, named for Margaret Wake, wife of colonial Gov. William Tryon; Mecklenburg County, named for Princess Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of George III.

2. Mt. Olive Pickle Co., in Mount Olive. Mt. Olive ranks third, behind Vlasic and Claussen, as the best-selling brand in the country.

3. True. It was the Augusta-area address of Jeeter Lester in Erskine Caldwell’s scandalous 1932 novel by that name.

4. Green.

5. Oxendine and Locklear.